Homeless Students Top One Million, U.S. Says, Leaving Advocates 'Horrified'

Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/28/homeless-students-us_n_1635709.html

Back in November of 2005, Diane Nilan had what she now concedes may have struck some people as a “crazy notion.” She’d been working as advocate for homeless families in Illinois, getting frustrated by the glacial pace of political and bureaucratic change, when she decided to sell her town house, buy a Gulfstream motor home, and set out on the road to talk to homeless families living around the country. She drove to Pensacola, Fla., and then to Lafayette, La., and then to a tiny town in Texas, where she met a little boy who had been abandoned by his mother. She spoke with homeless children and their families at campsites and motels and shelters, and filmed them in an attempt to share what she learned.

Since then, she's become one of the country's most prominent experts on family homelessness, logging 148,000 miles and talking to families in about 30 states. So she wasn't entirely surprised when she heard the latest bleak statistic: 1 million homeless students in America, according to a report released by the Department of Education this week. Talking to the families of such students, she said, she hears "the same story time after time. Lost their job, had some medical problems, things fell apart, boom, boom, boom. Now they're living in shelters or motels."

U.S. Education Department reported that, for the first time, the number of homeless students in America topped one million by the end of the 2010-2011 school year. These kids live in shelters and on the streets, and increasingly in hotels and on the couches of friends and relatives. On one hotel-lined stretch of highway -- a road leading to Disney World -- Nilan heard of schools where there are as many as 25 homeless students in classes of 28. The government report said 1,065,794 homeless kids were enrolled in schools in the 2010-2011 school year, an increase of 13 percent from the previous year and 57 percent since the start of the recession in 2007.